Lean LaunchPad for Life Science/Healthcare
January 2015 Syllabus
Course Director: Steve Blank
Teaching Team:
Lead Instructors
Nancy Kamei, Entrepreneur in Residence, UCSF School of
Pharmacy
Stephanie Marrus, Director, Entrepreneurship Center at UCSF and
Lecturer, UCSF
Todd Morrill, I-Corps National faculty, Bay Area Faculty Director
Cohort Instructors
Therapeutics: Karl Handelsman, Codon Capital
Digital Health:
Lynne Chou, Partner, Kleiner Perkins
Malay Gandhi, Managing Director, Rock Health
Chris DeNoia, Advisor, DoctorBase
Teaching Assistants
Therapeutics: Robin Mansukhani, CEO, Alzeca Biosciences
Digital Health: Kyra Davis, Program Manager, Entrepreneurship Center at
UCSF
Location:
Dates:
Office Hours:
Suggested Texts:
UCSF Mission Bay, Genentech Hall
Thursdays, January 8 – March 19
3:45-4:45 pm prior to Thursday class. See online signup sheet.
Startup Owner’s Manual: Blank & Dorf
Business Model Generation: Osterwalder, et al
Talking to Humans: Constable & Rimalovski
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Online Lectures:
On Udacity: How to Build a Startup: The Lean LaunchPad
https://www.udacity.com/course/ep245
Software:
Launchpad Central: https://launchpadcentral.com.
Students will be provided with an account.
Credit:
This is a non-credit course at UCSF. Credit granted to MTM
students by Berkeley.
Why Take This Class?
Over 400 teams have been trained in the Lean LaunchPad approach on how to
commercialize their research. The approach has been proven to help startups fail less,
and increase their odds for commercial success.
Success in translating science or medicine requires more than creating better science
or technology. A parallel track to optimize other elements of a business is essential for
turning an idea into a viable company.
Lean LaunchPad provides real world, hands-on learning on how to reduce
commercialization risk in early-stage ventures. Teams rapidly:
• Define clinical utility before spending millions of dollars
• Understand their core and secondary customers and purchase influences
• Learn the process required for initial clinical sales and downstream
commercialization
• Assess intellectual property and regulatory risk before they design and build
• Know the data will be required by future partnerships/collaboration/purchases
before doing the science
• Identify financing vehicles before they are needed
Course Objective
This is a practical class – essentially a lab, not a theory or “book” class. Our goal,
within the constraints of a classroom and a limited amount of time, is to help you find a
repeatable and scalable business model for your company. This will allow you to build a
company with substantially less money and in a shorter amount of time than using
traditional methods.
The class uses the Lean Startup method. Rather than engaging in months
of business planning, the method assumes that all you have is a series of
untested hypotheses—guesses about clinical utility, who the customer is,
payers, regulation, intellectual property, clinical trial requirements, user
requirements, customer acquisition, conversion rates, stickiness, business
models, value proposition, etc. Regardless of how elegant your plan, the
reality is that most of it is wrong. You need to get out of your lab or clinic to
search for the facts that validate or invalidate your hypotheses, and
ultimate enable you to pursue strategies that will accelerate the launch
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and development of your business.
Our class formalizes this search for a business
model. We do it with a process of hypothesis
testing that is familiar to every scientist and
clinician. In this class you will learn how to use
a Business Model Canvas -- a diagram of how
a company will create value for itself and its
customers-- to frame your hypotheses.
Second, you will “get out of the building” using an approach called
Customer Development to test your hypotheses. You will run experiments with
customers/partners and collect evidence about whether each of your
business hypotheses is true or false. Every week you will talk to customers,
partners, regulators, payers and competitors, testing your assumptions about
clinical utility, partners, IP, regulatory issues, product features, pricing,
distribution channels.
You will complete at least 100 interviews during the 10 weeks of class.
Finally, based on the customer and market feedback you gathered, you will
use agile development to rapidly iterate your product or concept to
build/design something customers would actually buy and use. This class
requires you to be nimble and fast. You will iterate on hypotheses and
rapidly assemble minimum viable products (MVPs) to immediately elicit
customer feedback. Using the input to revise your assumptions and
hypotheses, you will start the cycle again, testing redesigned offerings and
making further small adjustments (iterations) or more substantive changes
(pivots) to ideas that are not working.
This process of making substantive changes to one or more business model
hypotheses – called pivots – before you raise and spend millions of dollars,
helps avoid huge future costs and potentially unforeseen dead-ends when
far down the road of development.
A pivot might mean changing your position in the value chain. For example,
your company may become an OEM supplier to hospitals rather than selling
directly to physicians. Other pivots may move your company from a
platform technology to a product or from a B2B play to B2C.
Some teams may make even more radical changes. For example when one
team in a prior course discovered the “right” customer, they changed the
core technology which was the basis of their original idea to serve those
customers.
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Teaching Method
The class uses eight teaching methods: 1. Experiential learning, 2. Teambased activity, 3. “Flipped” classroom, 4. Domain specific lectures,
5. Weekly presentations, 6. Team Teaching, 7. Providing feedback to other teams
and 8. LaunchPad Central.
1. Experiential Learning
This class is not about the lectures. The learning occurs outside of the
classroom through conversations with customers. Each week your team will
conduct a minimum of 10 customer interviews focused on a specific part of
the Business Model Canvas. This class is a simulation of the real world for
startups and entrepreneurship: chaos, uncertainty, impossible deadlines with
insufficient time, conflicting input, etc.
2. Team-based
Class activities will be performed by your team of 3 to 5 people.
You will be admitted as a team. The commitment of the entire team to
the effort and necessary time expenditure is a key admission criterion.
Teams will self‐organize and establish individual roles on their own. There
are no formal CEO/VP’s, just the constant parsing and allocating of the
tasks that need to be done.
Every team member must participate in Customer Discovery activities -- out of
the building hypotheses testing -- talking with customers and partners. You
cannot delegate Customer Discovery.
In addition to the instructors and TA, each team will be assigned a mentor to
provide assistance and support.
3. The Flipped Classroom
Unlike a traditional classroom where the instructor presents lecture material,
you will watch core weekly lectures before coming to class. These lectures
contain the information you will need to complete that week’s customer
interviews. Class time will be allocated to weekly team progress updates rather
than lectures. The Teaching Team and mentors provide personalized
guidance to each team. The work you present weekly will be based on the
online lecture you watched the prior week and the in-class cohort lecture.
4. Domain Specific Lectures
Online lectures will be supplemented by in-class lectures and
discussions tailored to your specific cohort: therapeutics or digital
health.
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5. Weekly Team Presentation of Progress
Each week all teams will present a summary of what they learned when testing
specific hypotheses. The Teaching Team will provide advice and guidance.
6. Team Teaching and the Inverted Lecture Hall
Experienced instructors and mentors who have built and/or funded world
class startups and have worked with countless entrepreneurial teams sit at
the back of the classroom. They will comment on and critique each team’s
progress. While the comments may be specific to each team, the insights
are almost always applicable to all teams.
7. Actively Observing Other Teams and Providing Written Constructive
Feedback and Grades
The class is a learning cohort. It is your responsibility to help each other and
learn from one another’s experiences. This form of collaborative learning will
accelerate your team’s progress. Each week, when other teams are
presenting, you will be logged into the class online management tool,
LaunchPad Central, where you will provide feedback, ideas, helpful critiques
and suggestions for each team as they present. You will also assign a grade
solely on your individual assessment of their performance. This feedback is
viewable by all members of the class, and may – at the discretion of the
instructors – be shared for class discussion.
8. Keeping Track of Your Progress: LaunchPad Central (LPC)
Each week as you get of the building and talk to customers you will summarize what
you learned using an online tool, LaunchPad Central. The tool automatically
collects and displays your current hypotheses and the hypotheses you have
invalidated through interviews. This allows you to share your learnings with the
Teaching Team and mentors. We monitor your progress through this tool.
Class Culture
Startups communicate much differently from the university or company culture
you may be familiar with. At times the communication may feel relentlessly
direct, but in reality it is focused and designed to create immediate action in
time-, resource-, and cash-constrained environments. We have limited time
and we push, challenge, and question you in the hope that you will learn
quickly. The pace and uncertainty accelerate as the class proceeds.
We will be direct, open, and tough – just like the real world. This approach
may seem harsh or abrupt, but it is a direct reflection of our desire for you to
learn to challenge yourselves quickly and objectively, and to appreciate
that as entrepreneurs you need to learn and evolve faster than you ever
imagined possible. This class pushes many people past their comfort zone. If
you believe that the role of your instructors is to praise in public and criticize
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in private, do not take this class. You will be critiqued in front of your peers.
Time Commitment
Teams that have completed this course report spending 15- 20 hours each week on
course activities. Most of the effort is getting out of the classroom and
interviewing. Teams are expected to complete at least 10 in-person or Skype
video interviews each week focused on the Business Model Canvas area of
emphasis for that week. Over the 10-week course you will have completed
100 or more interviews.
If you are too busy to meet this commitment, do not take this class. Every
team member must complete customer interviews; you cannot delegate.
Homework
You are expected to complete 10-15 interviews per week and prepare a
presentation summarizing what you have learned, in addition to watching
online videos and reading. You will not be invited to present in class if your
interviews are incomplete. Telephone interviews, which are never as good as
in-person or Skype interviews, will be counted as less than one.
Class Structure
Class time will be divided into several parts:
1. Group feedback. The group will meet as a whole to reflect on lessons from the
week’s interviews. A small number of teams will present their weekly progress report
to the entire group.
2. Cohort presentations: Weekly presentations and progress tracking. Each team will
present an 8-minute weekly progress report to members of the Teaching Team in
their cohort. We will offer observations, suggestions and monitor your progress.
When your team is not presenting, each member of your team will be grading your
peers.
3. Lecture on next week’s topic: Following the team presentations, each cohort will
receive a lecture on the next portion of the Business Model Canvas to prepare you
for the week’s interviews. These lectures will be specific to your cohort.
Deliverables
Meaningful Customer Discovery requires the development of a minimum viable
product (MVP). The MVP is defined as follows:
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1 Therapeutics: Definition of the type and quality of data required
for a Biopharma to be interested in a commercial partnership or
other collaboration.
2 Digital health: a live website, alpha or beta.
Other deliverables are:
 Weekly LPC narrative. LPC should be updated after every customer
interview. Final updates for the week are due by Wednesday noon.
 Weekly 8 minute team presentation to summarize progress with slides.
 “Lessons Learned” Presentations -- At the last class,
each team will present their “Lessons Learned” to the
Teaching Team and invited guests, including investors,
in their exploration of commercial feasibility. The
presentation includes a PowerPoint summary of
Lessons Learned and a 2-minute video explaining your
journey’s highlights.
Note: Your slides will be public. They should not contain any
proprietary information.
Mentors
Mentorship is an important element for success of a venture and we have assembled a
group of experienced mentors to help guide you. Every team will be assigned a mentor
who has committed to spending two hours a week for the duration of the class. Our
mentors come from the Silicon Valley ecosystem and work with startup ventures,
lending their expertise in the “pay it forward” culture we are so fortunate to have in the
Bay Area. They will guide you through your learnings from customer interviews.
Class Schedule Overview
Date
Topic
January 8
January 15
January 22
January 29
February 5
February 12
February 19
February 26
Business Model Canvas/customer development
NO CLASS –LaunchPad Central self-administered training
Value Proposition
Customer Segments
Activities
Resources
Partners
Channels
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March 5
March 12
March 19
Customer relationships
Revenue models and costs; Storytelling
Lessons learned
Pre-Class Group Meeting Rooms
Rooms will be available for meeting before class to allow teams to convene and
prepare.
Presentation Format
Each week’s Powerpoint presentation builds on the prior weeks’ presentations. The
following core slides need to appear in every presentation, augmented by content
specific to the last week’s Business Model Canvas topic.
Core presentation
1.
Title slide: your team name, participants, number of interviews completed the
past week and in total; interviews broken down by in-person/Skype and phone.
2.
What you learned about the week’s topic by talking to customers. Section
headings are –
 What we thought
 What we did
 What we found
 What we’re going to do next
3.
Business Model Canvas with changes marked in red.
4.
Next week’s plan.
Slides listed under each class in the syllabus should be added to the core presentation
above.
Pre-class preparation
Teams are expected to hit the ground running. We assume you and your team have
come prepared having read the assigned materials and watched the online lectures.
We expect you to have spoken to 5 potential customers before the start of the class to
generate findings about your value proposition hypotheses.
The best performing teams get a good start and maintain a rapid pace of discovery
interviews. Remember that in a startup there is no “spare time.”
• Participate in the LaunchPad Central webinar.
http://blog.launchpadcentral.com/video-tutorials
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Online lessons in Udacity: 1 What we now know, 1.5a business models, 1.5b
customer development
“How to Do Customer Discovery” videos on LaunchPad Central
•
“How to Do Customer Discovery” videos on Vimeo
,http://vimeo.com/87302754
•
CD41 Pre-¬‐Planning: Contacts http://vimeo.com/87303446
•
CD42 Customer Interview Dry Runs http://vimeo.com/87302981
•
CD44 Pass/Fail Experiments http://vimeo.com/87302754
•
CD46 Conducting a Customer Interview http://vimeo.com/87302479
•
CD50 Looking for Insights http://vimeo.com/87301695
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CD01 Death By PowerPoint http://vimeo.com/76171146
•
CD04 Understanding the Problem http://vimeo.com/76173388
Giff Constable, “12 Tips for Early Customer Development Interviews,”
http://giffconstable.com/2012/12/12-tips-for-early-customer-developmentinterviews-revision-3/
Talk to 5 customers to complete your initial Business Model Canvas
Record the customer interviews in LaunchPad Central
If you’re a therapeutics team, look for IP that could be prior art.
Find potential competitors
Think about and be prepared to answer in class:
Therapeutics Teams
 What does your Target Product Profile look like?
 Who can quickly confirm it makes sense?
Dhealth Teams
 What is your revenue model?
 Who is the customer and why will they use your app?
All Teams
 What is the difference between search and execution?
 What is a business model versus a business plan?
 What is the Business Model Canvas?
 What are the 9 components of the Business Model Canvas?
 What is a hypothesis?
 What do we mean by “experiments”?
 What is Customer Development?
 What are the key tenets of Customer Development?
Presentation for first class. Core slides plus market size -- TAM/SAM/Target market for
Years 1-3
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Weekly Breakdown
Class 1: January 8. Business Model Canvas/Customer Development
Homework:
 Osterwalder Value Proposition Canvas
http://businessmodelalchemist.com/blog/2012/08/achieve-productmarket-fit-with-our-brand-new-value-proposition-designer.html and
http://businessmodelalchemist.com/blog/2012/09/test-your-valueproposition-supercharge-lean-startup-and-custdev-principles.html
 Online lesson on Udacity. Lesson 2, Value proposition
 Talk to 10-15 customers.
 Prepare presentation for next class. Core slides plus Value Proposition Canvas
o http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/downloads/value_proposition_
canvas.pdf
o What are the Products/Services, Pain Relievers, Gain Creators?
o What MVP you will test?
January 15. NO CLASS. LaunchPad Central self-administered training
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Hands-on team training on key features
Creating/updating discovery narrative posts
Creating/updating Business Model Canvas
Using audio recordings, pictures in interviews
Exporting canvas, contacts
Making an “Ask” of industry experts, faculty, other teams
Creating team profiles & opportunity assessments
Class 2: January 22. Value Proposition
Homework
Online lesson on Udacity. Lesson 3, customer segments.
Prepare presentation for next week on customer segments. Core slides plus:
How do customers solve their problem today? Does your value proposition solve it?
How?
• Diagram of Customer workflow
• Customer Archetypes -- Draw a diagram
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• Post discovery narratives on Launchpad Central
• Therapeutics teams start v.1 Target Product Profile: include data needed preclinically and clinically to validate your therapeutic
• Dhealth teams start storyboard for website
Class 3: January 29 Customer Segments
Homework
•
Online lesson 8 – Resources, Activities and Costs
Prepare presentation on Activities for next class. Core slides plus:
• What did you learn were your critical Activities?
o Freedom to operate/IP
o Clinical Trials
o Quality data
o Regulatory approval
Customer acquisition
• What experiments did you run to validate that these are activities?
• Rough diagram of activities and resources/partners needed to accomplish them
Class 4: February 5
Activities
Homework
Prep Presentation for next week on Resources. Core presentation plus:
•
What are your critical Resources?
•
Resources should match your critical Activities
o
Are they resources you already have?
o
Do you need to acquire or partner with others to get them?
o
How much will they cost?
o
What human resources will you need?
o
What equipment resources will you need?
o
What financial resources will you need to acquire all these resources?
•
What experiments did you run to validate that these resources can be acquired?
•
Rough diagram of activities and resources/partners needed to accomplish them.
Class 5:
February 12
Resources
Homework
• Online lesson 7 – Partners
Prep Presentation for next week on Partners. Core slides plus:
• What were your hypotheses about what partners will you need?
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Partners should match your critical Resources and Activities
o Why do you need these partners and what are risks?
o Why will they partner with you?
o What’s the cost of the partnership?
o Diagram the partner relationships with any dollar flows
o What are the incentives and impediments for the partners?
• What did you learn about your Partners?
• Final diagram of activities and resources/partners needed to accomplish them.
Class 6:
February 19
Partners
Homework
• Online lesson 4 – Channels
Prepare presentation for next week on Channels. Core slides plus:
•
What is the distribution channel? Are there alternatives? What was it that made
channel partners interested? Excited?
•
Draw the channel diagram. Annotate it with the channel economics.
•
Drug startups outline operational plan of pre-clinical and clinical data that drive
value.
• See Mark Leslie Value Chain slides at http://www.slideshare.net/markleslie01/070801value-chain-and-sales-model
• Review Startup Tools: http://steveblank.com/tools-and-blogs-forentrepreneurs/#startup-tools
Class 7:
February 26
Channels
Homework
Online lesson 5– Customer Relationships
Prepare presentation for next week on customer relationships. Core slides plus:
•
What were your objective pass/fail metrics for each “Get” test/methodology
•
Who are the Key Opinion Leaders (KOL’s)
•
Therapeutics:
Who will be on your Scientific Advisory Board (SAB)
What conferences do you need to present at?
What journals do you need to be in?
Who are the Bus Dev people you need to target?
Update Target Product Profile and list of top Biopharma prospects with
strategic need for your product.
•
Dhealth:
What is your customer acquisition cost? How will you create demand?
Build demand creation budget and forecast.
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Class 8:
March 5
Customer Relationships
Homework
 Online lesson 6 – Revenue Models
 Online lesson ‐ Storytelling. David Riemer, UC Berkeley Haas,
http://venturewell.org/i-corps/llpvideos/david-riemer/
o Draw the Get/Keep/Grow diagram -- Annotate it with the key metrics.
o Prepare presentation for next week on Revenue Models and Costs.
Core slides plus:
o What experiments do you run to test your revenue model and pricing?
o Diagram of payment flows
o Rough three-year income statement to show you have a real business with
your revenue model, channel, acquisition costs, etc.
o Diagram the finance and operations timeline
Class 9:
March 12
Revenue Models and Costs; Storytelling
Homework
 Get ready for the Lessons Learned presentation in the last class. Watch previous
teams’ final presentations
o See http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/ for examples
o Review: http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/lessonslearned-day-presentationskills-training
• Final 10‐minute presentation and a 2‐minute video
Class 10:
March 19
Lessons Learned Day
Presentation Format
Deliverable: Each team will present a 10-minute “Lessons Learned”
presentation about their business, plus a 2-minute video summarizing their
journey.
Incorporate storytelling elements in your presentation.
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The World – market/opportunity, how does it operate
The Characters – customers/value proposition/ product-market fit, pick a
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few examples to illustrate
Narrative Arc – lessons learned how? Enthusiasm, despair, learning then
insight
Show us – images and demo to illustrate learning = wireframes & pivots
to finished product
Editing – does each slide advance the character and plot (learning)
Theater
Point me at what you want me to see
Self-explanatory slides
Use analogies
Slide 1 – Team name, with a few lines of what your initial idea was and the
size of the opportunity
Slide 2 – Team members – name, background, expertise and your role on the team
Slide 3 – Business Model Canvas v.1. Use the Osterwalder Canvas; do not
make up your own. “Here was our original idea.”
Slide 4 – “Here’s what we did…” (explain how you got out of the
building)
Slide 5 – “Here’s what we found - reality, then…”
Every presentation requires at least three Business Model Canvas slides.
Side n – “Here’s where we ended up.” Talk about:
1. What you learned
2. Whether you think this a viable business,
3. Whether you want to pursue it after the class.
Final Slides – Click through each one of your Business Model Canvas slides.
Final presentation tips:
• You cannot possibly cover everything you learned in 10 weeks during a
10-minute presentation. Don’t try to. The final presentation is partly an
exercise in distilling the most critical, surprising, and impactful things you
learned in the process.
• Don’t fall into the trap of making your final presentation too high-level. If it
becomes an overview with no details you will lose the audience and you
will look no smarter than you did on Day 1. We need to see WHY your
Business Model Canvas evolved the way it did. Include anecdotes about
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specific customer interviews that support the story you are telling.
• If you have a demo, screenshots, a target product profile, etc., include it in
your presentation as a supporting character to illustrate your learning and
where it has gotten you. We are not just interested in WHAT your product is,
but WHY your product is – what did you learn from customers that shaped
the product?
2-minute video:
Create a video to be shown at the beginning of your final presentation. The
video should summarize the Customer Discovery journey your team went on,
highlighting the key customer insights that took you from your initial idea to
today. Storytelling quality is critical. High production value is not -- some of the
best videos have been very straightforward. Make it personal: include the
team in the video as well as key "aha" moments. This video is about the
discovery process. It is NOT a marketing video.
See sample videos here: Bionicks Video, Gutwiser Final Video, Dentometrix Video
Teaching Team Bios
Core Team
Nancy Kamei, Entrepreneur-in-Residence, UCSF School of Pharmacy
Nancy, a PharmD from UCSF, is a serial entrepreneur and investor. Nancy started her
career at Merck and managed a $1.8m sales territory in suburban/rural Pennsylvania.
She completed her MBA at Stanford and then entered the biotechnology industry
where she was in sales and later became an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Institutional
Venture Partners. She is a serial entrepreneur - having been on the start-up teams of four
successful biotechnology companies: Onyx Pharmaceuticals, Tularik GlycoGen, and
ImmuLogic. She has been an analyst/portfolio manager at Capital Group Companies
responsible for public equity investments in biotechnology, healthcare services and
facilities, and healthcare information technology, later. She transitioned to venture
capital at Intel Capital, worked on an investment strategy in Global Health for Aberdare
Ventures, and served as the Venture Capital Fellow for the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation.
Stephanie Marrus, Director, Entrepreneurship Center; Lecturer, UCSF; Faculty Bay Area ICorps.
Stephanie is responsible for delivering programs and courses enabling scientists and
clinicians to create entrepreneurial ventures based on UCSF technologies. She
leverages her participation in the Silicon Valley ecosystem to attract resources and
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entrepreneurship thought leadership to Campus. During a 25-year plus career, she has
been a corporate executive, business consultant and mentor with hundreds of
companies in science- and technology-based industries, many with their technological
roots at MIT, Harvard, the University of California and Stanford. Her consulting clients
have included venture capitalists, CEOs, National Science Foundation grantees and
foreign government entities. In addition to her business career, she served as Deputy
Secretary of Economic Affairs for a Massachusetts governor where she took the lead on
economic development and business policy. She has been President of a medical
research foundation and serves on the Advisory Board of a social venture startup
accelerator.
She was faculty at UC Berkeley and has been a guest lecturer at Stanford. Her
academic titles have included Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Lester Center, Haas
School of Business, UC Berkeley; Adjunct Professor, St. Petersburg State University
Graduate School of Management, Russia; and Entrepreneur-in-Residence, King
Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. She has guest
lectured in Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. She is on the faculty at the
NSF’s Bay Area I-Corps node.
She holds an MBA from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, an MA from
Columbia University and an AB from Cornell University.
Todd Morrill, Faculty Director and Instructor, Bay Area I-Corps
Todd has been building and leading bioscience companies since the first biotech
boom in the early 1980s. He has been employee number 500, number 10 and number 2
(several times) of venture-backed startups, as well as a founder of three companies. He
spent seven years in investment banking for pharma and biotech, and has worked at
multinational pharma, diagnostics and tools companies. His roles have included sales,
product management, marketing, R&D, business development and CEO. He has been
an independent Board member of three biotech companies. Todd taught at the Haas
School of Business, UC Berkeley from 2001 to 2009, where he is a Richard C. Holton
Teaching Fellow. His courses included Entrepreneurship in Biotechnology; Mergers and
Acquisitions; and Entrepreneurship. He has taught in the Intel Program in China and
Japan, the Malaysia/UCSF program, and in biotech programs in Estonia, Australia and
Abu Dhabi.
Todd received an MBA from Haas and his BA in Biology, with Highest Honors, from
Dartmouth College. He is an internationally-recognized author of many emails, has
received slightly less than one Olympic medal, and a comparable number of Nobel
nominations. He is an avid user of social interaction; his teenagers make fun of him on
Facebook and his wife makes fun of him in French.
He returned to teaching in 2013 because of his excitement with the NSF Innovation
Corps (I-corps) program.
Cohort Instructors
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Therapeutics: Karl Handelsman, Founder, Codon Capital
Formerly the General Partner Emeritus at CMEA Capital, Karl has a great passion for
science and innovation and has been privileged to work alongside many talented
entrepreneurs. The management teams at Ambrx, Ensemble Discovery, Ilypsa, Intellikine,
Kalypsys, Maxygen, Phenomix, Rigel, Syrrx, Tetraphase, and Xenoport – all have
contributed to Karl’s wealth of experience executing visionary plans. Prior to joining
CMEA, Karl worked in biotech business development at Millennium. He was one of the
first employees of Tularik, and the Whitehead Institute.
Digital Health: Chris DeNoia, Advisor DoctorBase
Chris has had several business development positions in the dhealth world, most
recently as VP Business Development for Amplify Health, where he defined the value
proposition and market fit for providers in value based payment models. A Lean
LaunchPad convert, he brought LLP to his company and led customer discovery
process following Lean Startup methodology for payer opportunities. He was VP
Business Development & Sales at Simplee, where he led business development and
sales efforts closing deals with Fortune 100 companies, leading HSA administrators,
private exchanges, and acute care hospital groups. He wore many hats at the seed
level including marketing, operations, security, compliance, etc. --whatever it took to
close and implement a deal. He has an MBA from the joint Columbia University/London
Business School program.
Lynne Chou, Partner, Kleiner Perkins
Lynne joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers in 2013 and focuses on life science
investing in medical devices, diagnostics, and digital health. Before joining KPCB, Lynne
had over twelve years of healthcare operating and investing experience. Most recently,
Lynne worked for eight years at Abbott Vascular and Guidant in multiple roles and
worked on the launch of over ten interventional cardiology and cardiac surgery
product families both in the US and internationally. Most recently, Lynne lead the global
launch of Absorb, the world’s first bio-resorbable vascular scaffold, recognized by Wall
Street Journal as Medical Device Technology Innovation of the Year and Popular
Mechanics. Lynne was responsible for building the global commercial strategy and
therapy development as well as playing a key role in the clinical, reimbursement,
operational strategy for the therapy. Earlier in her career, Lynne worked at Apax
Partners with a focus on software venture capital investing. In addition, Lynne worked at
Goldman Sachs in the Mergers and Acquisitions group and worked on multiple multibillion dollar acquisitions and sell side transactions in various industries. Lynne earned a
bachelor of science degree in industrial engineering from Stanford University and an
MBA from Harvard Business School.
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Malay Gandhi, Managing Director, Rock Health
Malay serves as Rock Health’s Managing Director, leading the organization and working
closely with portfolio companies. He joined Rock Health in 2012 after nearly eight years
with Deloitte Consulting’s healthcare practice. Malay earned a Masters concentrated
in Health Policy and Management from the University of Pittsburgh and a BS from West
Virginia University. His work in digital health has been cited in the Harvard Business
Review, Financial Times, CNBC, USA Today, Inc. and KQED.
Teaching Assistants
Kyra Davis, Program Manager, Entrepreneurship Center at UCSF
Kyra.davis@ucsf.edu, (415) 502-1612
Kyra has been at the Entrepreneurship Center since 2012 where she is responsible for
executing programs to support doctors and scientists getting ideas out of the lab and
into the market. Previously, she raised seed funding and managed an international
team as a cofounder of VOZ (www.madebyvoz.com), a company that brings
indigenous textiles to the high fashion market. Kyra graduated from UC Berkeley in 2008
and earned a Masters in Management with honors from the London School of
Economics, focusing on innovation.
Robin Mansukhani, CEO & President, Alzeca
Robin Mansukhani is President & CEO of Alzeca Biosciences. Previously, Robin was a
founder of Cense Biosciences, which has glucose responsive insulin for type I and type II
diabetes and Ecorithm, an energy company. He contributed to the initial founding
and/or operation of LivingGreen Materials and Azano Pharmaceuticals. He worked for
The Maple Fund, an early stage venture capital firm. He is Co-founder and Chief
Operating Officer of BlueStamp Engineering, a New York City and Houston based,
hands on engineering program for high school students. He has been an invited
speaker both domestically and abroad, including TEDx. Robin holds a B.S. in
Biochemistry from Case Western Reserve University.
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